Santa Cruz Fiber is a city-wide Gigabit fiber network with the goal of providing affordable Gigabit Internet to as many of the 22,000 residences and business in the City of Santa Cruz as possible.

For this grand venture they needed a distinct brand that could be used to represent a movement and a website that would entice users to get their area to be next in line for the fiber rollout.

In addition, they needed to convey their commitment to protecting the open internet, championing net neutrality, and customer data privacy. Lastly, they wanted to highlight their local credentials.

We knew from the beginning that we wanted to create a brand that felt more like a skate company than an ISP, in order to speak to the Santa Cruz culture. Our approach to the website was to model it after a grassroots political campaign. There needed to be multiple ways to learn about the project and its progress. It had to engage the audience and keep them invested in the project’s success, even if service to their door was more than a year away.

The Brand

We approached the brand with a bold idea: focus on the speed and freedom that fiber internet provides, rather than the technology that makes it possible. With this in mind, we created a wordmark inspired by the aesthetics of a classic motorcycle—one that lives up to the tagline: Light. Speed. Internet. All of the letter forms have movement to them culminating in the ‘wings’ formed by the B and E.

In an effort to keep the Santa Cruz Fiber brand light, fun, and fast, we extended the main wordmark into a series of playful illustrations to communicate concepts visually with a dash of delight.

The Campaign

We built a rollout campaign and a pre-signup site designed to get potential customers excited by the opportunity to sign up for fiber internet. We based our campaign strategy around individual neighborhoods and enticed users to sign up to bring fiber to their neighborhood first.

The Website

Neighborhood progress is clearly displayed. The goal is to entice users to get their area to be next in line for the fiber rollout. Users can pre-sign up or pledge, and each action gets their neighborhood closer to full-fledged fiber. On the Why Fiber? page we reinforce Cruzio’s philosophy of community engagement, buying local services, net neutrality, and privacy. The overall design and messaging emphasizes how city-wide adoption helps numerous individual enterprises which, in turn, helps the community.

The mobile experience is clear and intuitive, allowing users all of the same functionality they would experience on a laptop.

The Technical Aspects

Integrating Craft CMS with Cruzio's internal system was the main challenge for this site since that same internal system controls multiple items throughout the site.

The biggest place where this came into play was with the Address Lookup Tool. The Address Lookup Tool is the main component on the site that users are driven to and is the primary way to determine if a user's address is covered by Cruzio's services and if so, what exact services are offered there.

Here's the "order of operations" for how it works:

User starts to type in their address and Google's Place API suggests addresses that match closest to the user's current input as they're typing.

Upon submitting, that address data is then sent to an internal Cruzio API Endpoint that returns all the data they have for that address. things like:what neighborhood they fall within (we use that to redirect to the specific neighborhood page), what services that have available to them, the lat/long for the address, etc.

Once the Cruzio data is returned, the address data is then stored in cookies and then the user is redirected to their appropriate neighborhood page. On that page, cookies are fetched and the appropriate content is displayed on the page.

The data for services available at the submitted address are a one-to-one match with Service entries in the CMS. The stored data is then used to determine what Services entries to display from the CMS; whether that's various Cruzio services, links to surveys, etc.

From there, the user selects their service, which takes them to a form to submit their information to Cruzio.

Cruzio will then follow up and take steps to get that user connected with their services.

This crucial integration allows the Cruzio team to offer real time data to their users and provides a seamless way for people to sign up for their services.